AI Crafter #1 - Gnome Pattern Fail - 7 January 2025

My cooking experiment following a Gemini AI recipe the other day wasn’t too bad. I did spot a mistake in the instructions but managed to sort it.

This time I wanted to check how good a Gnome knitting pattern I could get from Gemini AI.

_{Right and wrong side of the same body piece}

Above you can see the result. It’s not the whole project because I actually quickly gave up.

I printed the whole pattern. Above you can see it does contain all the standard information that you'd expect : materials, gauge needed and abbreviations used.

Perhaps my prompt wasn’t perfect; perhaps I should have specified the 3-D element of the pattern I wanted.

The pattern was divided further into the parts of the gnome : body, head, hat. I realised at that point that I wasn’t getting arms for it, but I continued to read the instructions :

I was very surprised that for the body it only stated to cast on 12 stitches. The finished piece I showed you above is the result with 12 stitches. I'd have expected at least double that number of stitches to then be able to sew and stuff. Then I thought that perhaps I might just knit another body part, sew them together and stuff them. Nowhere did it say to do all that though. Instructions are normally more complete and leave little to the imagination so that the crafter doesn't get confused.

In addition Step 3 in the instructions is very unclear. If the first row begins a 2x2 rib (ie knit 2, purl 2 and so on), the second row breaks the pattern because it states I should knit 4 stitches and then repeat. Also normally patterns include an asterisk (*) from where an instruction needs to be repeated.

I followed the instruction up to row 20. You can see that it produced a ‘stitch’. I actually don’t mind the stitch at all but a wider piece of knitting would have a column of ‘knit stitches’. I wonder where that stitch came from and whether or not it's got a name.

I got confused by Step 5. You’d normally need that ‘Shape armhole’ instruction for a cardigan or a sweater, not for a toy like that, particularly when no arms are being included. I ignored that for a minute, but then it read 'Knit two (k2), purl 2 stitches together (p2tog), knit 2 stitches (k2),, purl 2 stitches together (p2tog), knit 2 stitches (k2), purl 2 stitches together (p2tog), knit 2 stitches (k2)'. As I only had 12 stitches to start with that was ridiculous. As you can see the following rows keep to that pattern. Somehow on Step 10 it still has 4 stitches to cast off.

I completed the body piece but it’s wrong because the instructions are not right. Would this count as an hallucination ?

I couldn’t bring myself to follow the instructions above because I lost confidence in the pattern. Should I knit this ‘head’ my gnome would end up with a carrot-shaped head slightly wider in the middle. The starting point is only 12 stitches (again) and at its widest point there are 18 stitches. Nowhere does it say to sew but it does tell you to ‘stuff it firmly’

Once again the pattern starts with ‘Cast on 12 stitches’ this time for the hat. It uses the same sort of ‘stitch’ as for the body and the hat has a similar shape to the head. Yikes !

For the Beard the instructions just state to cut a length of yarn and sew it to the bottom of the head. There are no real instructions on how to do it. Normally patterns contain inspiring photos.

I’m very open minded when it comes to new technology. I’ve also heard of people warning against buying patterns that have been made using AI. Above I hope I have shown you why.

I'll keep testing every so often to check how good AI has become at 'creating' patterns. For the record the Gemini AI pattern included a photo which bears no resemblance to what I'd get had I knitted the pattern supplied, have a look here.

The score so far is Gemini AI 0 - Human 2

Thank you for reading !